I call bullshit on James Wolcott’s ‘portable radio’ story

“There’s something very awry when Michael Savage is the voice of reason.”

That was Vanity Fair scribe James Wolcott’s backhanded compliment – part of a bitter bleat against the “birthers” and “Tea Party coots” he’d been forced to interact with while running a recent errand to the drug store.

Yesterday there was a Tea Party coot standing in line at Duane Reade [a chain of NY pharmacies] with his portable radio blaring. (His radio was stickered with Tea Party slogans, lest you think I’m engaging in assumptive political profiling.)

His speaker was piping out that day’s installment of the Michael Savage show.

Now if he had been a young black man playing full-blare rap in a checkout line and James Lileks happened to be standing behind him, Lileks would have gotten 2,000 words out of it — what it says about our coarsening society — Gerard Van der Leun would have cited it as the greatest piece of eloquence since some psalm or another, and Instapundit would have given it an ‘instalanche.